State of the News Print Media in Australia 2006

Chapter 2

Five major trends

What are the major trends in 2006?

The core development is the transformative embrace by newspapers of the Internet. Company indecision is over. They have decided they have no option but to make a combined newspaper-Internet approach synergistic, profitable and durable.

Within this unfinished transformational change what are the key trends? Research, reported in more detail later in the document, highlights five major trends.

1.  Newspaper companies are rapidly transforming into multi-media companies

Penetration of internet access into Australian homes had reached 56 per cent (65 per cent of which was by broadband) by the end of the 2004/2005 year. Abundant indications that an increasing number of Australians were turning to Internet sources for information in real time have led major metropolitan newspapers, and some regional dailies, to establish parallel print and online editions.

There are several dimensions to as yet incomplete changes.
  1. The race to be first to disseminate news has already led to sections of on-line newspaper sites devoted to breaking news. In the last 18 months metropolitan newspapers that had been updating their internet sites as the day progressed, while reserving exclusives and scoops for the morning newspapers, have reviewed that policy. Newspapers such as The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and the Herald Sun, are moving to the 24-hour newsroom, filing stories online as news breaks.

  2. Newspapers are more sharply sectionalised, including the insertion of more glossy, full colour magazines that concentrate on topics like travel, cooking and luxury goods, topics likely to attract advertising revenue and to be attractive to well-off A-B readers. Sectionalisation, particularly of Sunday newspapers, has the additional economic advantage of allowing more advance printing and the use of the same material in many newspapers within the same company.

  3. Imperatives for the commercialisation of information have increased as Internet advertising has grown. Newspapers are seeking Internet classified and other advertisement revenue to replace diminishing classified advertising. They are by buying successful real estate, job, and car web-sites. On the content side they have always bought and sold information, news, opinion pieces and photographs. Increasingly there are also efforts to monetise archival and other content information they may hold. A sign of the times is the link-up of News Limited with Google (at least in the US). More and more papers are directing their readers to Internet sites for commercially available additional content material. Measurement of unique newspaper and online edition (and dual) readership is being attempted.

  4. Newspapers have become innovative in supplying news using multiple media formats including video and audio. Newsrooms now often include a special audio and video recording suite. Various newspapers offer videos of news events off their online home page as well as entertainment and other videos.

  5. The growing availability of free-of-charge blogs (both news and opinion) on the Internet threaten the previous monopoly over authoritative news, and the informed questioning of government and privileged minorities essential to democracies, that newspapers uniquely offered. Even the historic richness and variety of their information sources is being challenged. More and more newspapers are responding by encouraging their regular journalists to publish blog pieces. Lack of credibility and doubts about authenticity is the chief drawback of self-motivated, unedited blogging, particularly anonymous blogging. Newspapers entering the field, insisting upon the normal requirements for authenticated material and appropriate ethics from their staff, expect, no doubt, that those features of their "brands" will eventually result in them becoming the sole, or at least preferred, choices of readers.

2.  Major changes in the role and expectations of journalists

The general convergence of digital media sources resulting in mobile devices of all kinds, including phones that receive and transmit text and video content have forced reconsideration of the nature of newsrooms. The exact nature and dimensions of newsrooms of the future are only gradually taking shape. While the general directions of change are discernible, frequently there is a one step at a time, "suck it and see" approach. There is division of opinion about whether a completely integrated newsroom or separate editorial and journalistic staff is the way to go.

Emerging trends have implications for journalists. In future it probably will not be the sole role for journalists employed by newspaper companies to find stories and compose them into well-written reports that appear only in print2. The same, or re-written or re-edited, content might be destined for the company's online site, for fee-based stored audio and video files available to a variety of text, audio and video devices, or even SMS mobile phones.

Two potent questions follow for the print press. One, what will newspapers have to do to ensure the public still has reasons to buy newspapers and, two, will journalists have to become multi-skilled, able to appear in front of a camera and speak engagingly for audio files as well as seek out and write original stories for the newspaper? Will physical attraction become a key recruitment criterion?

The first question keeps editors awake at nights, especially as Chief Executive Officers of what are now mostly stock-exchange listed rather than family companies cannot be forgiving of editors and senior staff who preside over circulation declines. And that pressure cascades down the line.

Newspapers argue that their "brands" are known for their variety of expertly edited, accurate information, for the highly valued "constructions of the world" they offer, the more valuable because they regularly surprise and expand readers' interests and knowledge, whereas the Internet provides only the information a person searches for and knows he/she wants. Research shows that newspapers are read in depth because of greater reader trust in their accuracy and credibility, their flexibility and internal diversity, relative to other media. It may be that these are the values that newspapers must strive to capitalise upon.

What skills will journalists need? How should they be trained for the new convergent media world? Will future newsrooms consist of a small number of superbly skilled specialist editors drawing on a few globalised, homogeneous news sources (e.g., Google News, The New York Times, The Washington Post ) with local content gathered by small numbers of all-purpose, casualised freelancers, equipped with video and audio devices?

Cartoon: Journalist by Tandberg

3.  Blurring of fact and opinion.

Two aspects of the trend toward blurring of fact and opinion are evident. One derives from the increased incidence of the intermingling of news and commentary, some commentary even passing as news, and the other from the never-ending battle between attempts by informants to shape what newspapers publish and objectivity.

No news report can be completely objective, as there is undoubtedly an onus on journalists to provide sufficient background and interpretation for readers to understand the substance of a report. Often this will be partly subjective. Certainly changing times have weakened objectivity.

  1. The capacity of TV, Internet and blogging for real time "raw" reporting sometimes results in newspapers competing via commentary and analysis, claiming greater expertise.

  2. The advent and widespread use of journalist by-lines with accompanying photo accentuates their individuality and apparent expertise, their celebrity status, rather than authoritative editing and reputation-building by the newspaper as a whole. Few by-lined writers can resist insinuating their own perspectives. Acceptance by editors of their responsibility to make clear distinctions between news and commentary is lower.

  3. The news content analysis in Chapter 4 identifies the much greater reliance in Australia on single sources for stories than the comparable data reported in the similar American survey.

  4. In poorly staffed newsrooms press releases are too often taken at face value in whole or part. While editors are often aware that there is another story behind the release, newsroom resources are often insufficient to pursue other angles or viewpoints.

The second aspect is the trend to information being mediated by an array of public relations and other staff. The corollary is prominent public figures complaining to the Press Council about lack of balanced and fair reporting, despite having gone to considerable lengths to prevent journalist contact with them or anyone with first hand knowledge. It becomes difficult to the point of impossibility for reporters to get the "real" story, or even balancing comment from the mayor, minister, general, CEO, police, army, or other people directly involved. There has been sufficient success in getting one-sided versions of the truth into newspapers for more individuals and organisations to see strong "media management" as the best way forward.

The big question arising from decreased objectivity is whether newspapers are unthinkingly ceding a core competency—a basic reason for readership.


4.  Proposed changes in media ownership laws will not establish or preserve diversity of ownership of Australian newspapers.

Debate about cross-media laws, existing and proposed, is a hot topic late in 2006. Sceptics do not believe the Federal government's stated intention to ensure a diversity of voices in each locality, while loosening long-standing legislative restrictions on cross-media ownership, is achievable.

Whatever the outcome of debate about new legislation, however, economic and other trends make realisation of the objective a doubtful result. Even the increased ease of desk-top and other community publishing is unlikely to balance the seemingly unstoppable long-term trend towards concentration of ownership of high-circulation newspapers.

Moreover, there are trends toward concentration and decreased diversity from another direction. As later chapters will traverse in more detail, the vast bulk of newspapers in Australia are owned by five companies, with one, News Limited having a 68 per cent share of the Australian newspaper market. The disappearance of family-owned companies has reached the point where there are only three regional dailies in that category (Shepparton, Mildura and Wagga Wagga); if they sell they sell to one of the big five.

Technology and the continuing trend to big owners seeking economies of scale have already engendered considerable within-company syndication of copy. The trend will inevitably increase. Service notices, the weather, racing information, and the stockmarket are current examples. Cost cutting also dictates that an increasing amount of common content for local newspaper, radio, or television outlets outside capital cities will come from centralised newsrooms. Already minimal local staff resources for the reporting of news or for investigative reporting are not going to increase.


5.  The capacity of the press to inform the public is being eroded through administrative and legal curbs.

We continue to live in one of the more open and democratic countries of the world, but that fact is no cause for complacency. The rise and rise of government information management over the past five years is a significant trend. It is exemplified in a number of ways; failure to apply Freedom of Information Acts as intended (inevitably to be exacerbated by the recent High Court decision confirming the power of a Minister to issue a Conclusive Certificate denying access to government information), specious use of the Privacy Act, pervasive, deliberate media management, and other special purpose illiberal legislation. On every side there are examples of limitations on access to information that, in the public interest, newspapers ought to be able to publish.

New Australian security and sedition laws, in the name of terrorism, have the potential to be used secretly to lock up people, without anyone being allowed to know, let alone test the rightness of such action in the courts.

Cartoon: Arrest by Tandberg

A number of other new legal developments have the same eroding effect on previous freedoms. Apart from suppression associated with terrorism our courts in all states and federally increasingly resort to suppression orders to delay or prevent open reports of their proceedings.

Such restrictions deny the public its right to examine policies and events that affect it, and make better informed decisions that is its democratic right, even obligation.

Retention of a civil society depends to a large extent on the openness of government and public confidence in the probity and intentions of its public institutions. The unmistakeable trend is toward inhibiting the capacity of newspapers to report openly and in detail, despite their responsibility to hold a mirror to society reflecting its workings, good and bad, including terrorism, corruption, hypocrisy and malfeasance.